Love (Cirque du Soleil)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and George Martin sat together for the gala opening of Love on the 30th of June 2006. The performance took place inside a theatre built specifically for the production, at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Cynthia Lennon, Julian Lennon, and Olivia and Dhani Harrison filled out the audience that night. It was the biggest gathering of the Beatles' extended family since the band's breakup. When the show ended, McCartney, Starr, Olivia, Ono, and Martin walked out onto the stage together. A band that split up decades earlier had pulled its closest survivors into one room, inside a casino theatre in the desert. What convinced a founding Beatle to hand his catalog to a circus company? How do you build a stage show out of song lyrics instead of biography? And why, years later, would Cirque du Soleil decide to close the doors on this show for good?

• 2. The Deal

  ›

  In 2000, George Harrison sat down with his friend Guy Laliberté, one of Cirque du Soleil's founders. The two began talking through an idea: a stage show built from the Beatles' music.

  Three years of negotiation followed, involving surviving band members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Beatles widows Olivia Harrison, representing George Harrison, and Yoko Ono, representing John Lennon, took part as well. Apple Corps Ltd, the Beatles' holding company, and the Mirage were also at the table, and the talks eventually produced an agreement. The resulting partnership marked the first time Apple Corps Ltd had joined a theatrical production.

  Neil Aspinall, then Apple Corps' manager, became the show's first executive producer. Dominic Champagne wrote and directed the production, and shared credit for the original concept with Gilles Ste-Croix, one of Cirque's founders. Chantal Tremblay served as creation director. Tickets for the show went on sale on the 19th of April 2006.

• 3. Life Of The Show

  ›

  Preview performances ran from the 2nd of June to the 29th of June 2006, just ahead of the gala opening. A year later, on the 26th of June 2007, key parties gathered at the Mirage to mark the show's first anniversary. McCartney, Starr, Olivia Harrison, and Yoko Ono sat down with CNN's Larry King for an interview shortly before the show began. The group then unveiled a plaque at the Mirage Hotel in memory of John Lennon and George Harrison.

  Starting in late October 2010, Cirque du Soleil began offering backstage tours of the Love Theatre. Visitors could walk the backstage wings, training rooms, costume workshop, and break area, then climb a catwalk into the sound and lighting booths. Because the tour followed a regular working day, visitors might catch performers training, rehearsing, or working out rather than performing.

  Leading up to the show's 10th anniversary in July 2016, producers reworked parts of the production. They updated the imagery and costumes, revised some of the acts, and added and removed pieces of music.

  The COVID-19 pandemic shut the show down entirely, from March 2020 until it reopened in August 2021. The production would keep running for several more years before an announcement changed everything.

• 4. Rewriting The Story

  ›

  The Blitz opens the loose narrative Love tells. From there it moves through the band's founding, its climb into superstardom, its psychedelic and spiritual work, and the split in 1970. The finale turns into a joyful staging of the very reunion the production represents.

  Sgt. Pepper serves as a central figure in this landscape, a circus ringmaster-like character who encounters other figures pulled straight from the Beatles' lyrics. He crosses paths with Lucy in the Sky, Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna, and Mr. Kite, none of them played as the real historical Beatles. The show breaks its own rule twice. The 'Here Comes the Sun' scene features a character resembling Krishna. Several other scenes include mop-topped, dark-haired figures in black suits who resemble the early Beatles. In total, 65 performers from around the world made up the international cast.

  Doctor Robert hosts the show, one of a wide cast of characters drawn entirely from Beatles songs rather than from the band's biography. Eleanor Rigby appears as an English woman, and Father McKenzie as a preacher from an older time, both lifted directly from their song. Julia evokes John Lennon's mother, also named Julia, while Her Majesty stands for national pride, often framed inside a large oval portrait. The Nowhere Men, a quartet made up of the Pink Nowhere Man, Doctor Robert, the Fool, and Eggman, represent the show's broader mood. Nurses act as the show's caregiving stagehands, and Sugar Plum Fairy appears as a charming disc jockey. Mr. Piggy represents the aristocracy's traditional values, Lady Madonna stands for motherhood, and Lucy and the Fireman appear as a pair of lovers. Rounding out the ensemble are the Groupies, Teddy Boys, Sailors, and the Kids of Liverpool.

  Bringing this many characters to life took a stage built specifically to move them, and costumes designed to match a world built entirely out of song.

• 5. A Theatre Built For This

  ›

  French designer Jean Rabasse built the Love Theatre at the Mirage to house 6,351 speakers and 2,013 seats arranged around a central stage. Every seat carried three speakers of its own, including a pair built into the headrest, on a sound system designed by Jonathan Deans.

  The stage itself held 11 lifts, 4 traps, and 13 automated tracks and trolleys, with each lift capable of raising 20,000 pounds.

  Thirty-two digital projectors powered the show's visuals, sending high-definition images digitally from source to screen across panoramic pictures 100 feet wide. Digital displays on two walls above the audience highlighted elements of the show and handled transitions between scenes. Designer Francis Laporte created enormous projected images for four translucent screens that could unfurl to divide the auditorium in two.

  The Love Theatre replaced the Mirage's Siegfried & Roy theater and was said to have cost more than $100 million to build. Built as a theatre in the round, it seated audiences 360 degrees around the stage across four balconies. The furthest seat sat 98 feet from center stage. The closest sat 23 feet and 4 inches from center stage, just 2 feet and 9 inches from the stage's edge.

  All of it existed to support the acrobatics and costumes still to come, not a single actor standing on a bare stage.

• 6. Motion And Costume

  ›

  'Come Together' anchors one of Love's acrobatic sequences, one of several songs matched to its own physical discipline. 'Get Back' set up a bungee routine, and 'Help!' became a skating act. 'Sgt. Pepper' was staged on the Korean rope, while 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' turned into a trampoline sequence. 'Here Comes the Sun' featured rope contortion, and an aerial Russian swing routine was performed by Kris Carrison. Other segments rounded out the physical performance: a Solo Bar, trapeze work, latex rope, Spanish web, and free running.

  Philippe Guillotel, the show's costume designer, wanted the same spirit running through the Beatles' music to show up in what performers wore. For the Sgt. Pepper Parade, his team drew on Savile Row tailoring traditions, then turned the finished outfits inside out. Many costumes juxtaposed traditional and Victorian fashion with colorful, imaginative design, sophisticated and voluminous enough to look almost like a cartoon.

  What audiences heard next had been decided years earlier, in a recording studio far from the Mirage.

• 7. Stitching Sound Together

  ›

  Abbey Road Studios' original session tapes for the Beatles were pulled apart and re-orchestrated to build the musical foundation of Love. George Martin, the band's original producer, worked with his son Giles Martin to comb through the group's entire recorded archive. Their approach, drawing on the whole catalog to score a stage production, had no real precedent.

  Engineers sampled 120 songs to build 27 finished musical pieces, blending the lyrics and instrumentation of one track into the next.

  'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' got the show's only newly composed music, a string arrangement George Martin wrote to accompany the song's first studio demo.

  A commercial soundtrack album of the production was released in November 2006. That soundtrack gave listeners outside Las Vegas their only way to hear what George Martin and his son had built from the archive.

• 8. Legacy And Closing Night

  ›

  A documentary on the making of Love, titled All Together Now, was released on the 20th of October 2008.

  Several scenes from the stage show later resurfaced in Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away. They included 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' 'Blackbird,' and 'Octopus' Garden.' Also featured were 'Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,' 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps,' and 'Get Back/Glass Onion.'

  The New York Times wrote: "In the end, “Love” is a measure of how the Beatles’ music continues to speak to new listeners, and how the group’s constituency has continued to expand: The show’s audience of eight million is vastly larger than the number of people who saw the Beatles perform live."

  Variety called it "An ambitious blend of Beatles biography and lyrical interpretation shapes Cirque du Soleil‘s latest Las Vegas extravaganza."

  On the 10th of April 2024, Cirque du Soleil announced that Love would close. The final performance was set for the 7th of July, Ringo Starr's 84th birthday. The Mirage itself is being redeveloped into a Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, expected to reopen in 2027. The Love Theatre will not be rebuilt inside the new hotel, and no plans have been announced to reboot the show anywhere else.